The inventive concept relates to semiconductor devices. More particularly, the inventive concept relates to semiconductor devices having a dummy active region.
There is a growing demand for semiconductor devices that operate at higher speeds and/or that have higher degrees of integration. Accordingly, a great amount of importance is attached to the layout design of semiconductor devices as well as the circuit design of and techniques used for manufacturing today's semiconductor devices.
A typical semiconductor device includes a semiconductor substrate, a device isolation pattern dividing the substrate into active regions, and electronic components disposed at the active regions and insulated from each other by the device isolation pattern. As semiconductor devices become more highly integrated, the widths of device isolation patterns are becoming smaller. One technique for forming a narrow device isolation pattern is a shallow trench isolation (STI) technique. In this technique, a trench is formed in the substrate, and the trench is filled with insulating material to divide an upper portion of the substrate into active regions. However, a device isolation pattern in a trench formed in a semiconductor substrate may stress the semiconductor substrate (specifically, the active regions). In the case in which the electronic components formed at the active regions are MOS transistors, for example, the stress generated by a device isolation pattern formed in a trench is imparted to the MOS transistors and the operating characteristics of the MOS transistors can be adversely affected by the stress.
Furthermore, the MOS transistors may be concentrated within a predetermined region of the substrate. In this case, the stress imparted to a MOS transistor located in a central part of that region may be different from the stress imparted to a MOS transistor located at the periphery of that region.